The Fire in Fiction (31 page)

TRANSFORMING LOW-TENSION TRAPS

Weather openings are common—and dull. At my office, we toss them aside with grunts of impatience. "Weather opening" somebody mutters, and we all nod. Most writers are trying to use the weather as foreshadowing, a hint of storms to come. That's fine, but most of the time tension wafts away.

The Uses of Enchantment
(2006) was Heidi Julavits's third novel, following
The Mineral Palace
(2000) and
The Effect of Living Backwards
(2003). It begins one afternoon in 1985 when a sixteen-year-old girl, Mary Veal, disappears from the grounds of her prep school

in the Boston suburb of West Salem, Massachusetts. Julavits begins her opening this way:

The following might have happened on a late-fall afternoon in the Boston suburb of West Salem. The afternoon in question was biting enough to suggest the early possibility of snow. The cloud cover made it seem later than the actual time of 3:35
p.m.

The girl was one of many girls in field hockey skirts, sweatpants, and ski shells, huddled together in the green lean-to emblazoned with Semmering Academy's scripted S. It had rained all morning and all afternoon; though the rain had temporarily ceased, the playing field remained a patchwork of brown grass and mud bordered by a rain-swept chalk line. Last month a Semmering wing had torn an ankle tendon in similarly poor conditions, but the referee refused to call the game until 4 p.m. because the preparatory school extracurricular activities rules and regulations handbook stipulated that "sporting events shall not be canceled due to weather until one hour past the official start time."

At 3:37, the rain recommenced. The girls whined and shivered while Coach Betsy glowered beneath the brim of her
umass crew
baseball cap. These girls were not tough girls and they had little incentive, given their eight-game losing streak, to endure a rainy November afternoon.

At 3:42, the girl asked Coach Betsy if she could be excused to the field house. The girl did not say, but she implied that she had her period. Coach Betsy nodded her reluctant permission. The girl departed from the lean-to, unnoticed by her teammates.

The Uses of Enchantment
got many starred and glowing reviews, and yet it opens with the weather. What gives? Are rainy November afternoons inherently more interesting in Massachusetts, or because

the author's previous two novels were notable? Is it actually the girls in their field hockey skirts that hook our attention? I don't think so.

Julavits uses the drizzle not to invoke atmosphere but as a concrete factor in the story's kickoff, or rather, as an element in the doubt she is planting. Check again her opening line: "The following
might
have happened on a late-fall afternoon ..." (emphasis mine). You may not notice it, it passes so quickly, but that tricky little phrase triggers subconscious suspicions. Is the author telling us the truth?

Julavits deepens the mystery as Mary Veal goes not to the locker room but across the street to clamber into a lurking Mercedes—or does she? The remainder of the novel, inspired in part by Freud's "Dora" case history, teases us with the truth. The weather, here, is not the point. The point is that everybody, including the author, spins their stories in ways that serve their unconscious desires and needs.

To put it differently, the weather has an effect on us not because it is an outward portent but because it is tied to an inward storm. A lightning flash in the sky is just a cliche until it is fused to a bolt of interior tension. Describe the plain old weather and who cares? Provoke anxiety in the readers first and then—
brrr
—the icy November drizzle gives us a chill.

Surveying-the-landscape openings are just as common as weather starts, and equally ineffective. Most of the time. Reed Farrel Coleman's mystery novel
Soul Patch
(2007), discussed previously in chapter four, was a nominee for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. Coleman's gritty series is set in Brooklyn, in this case on Coney Island. Coleman opens
Soul Patch
with the following take on his setting:

Nothing is so sad as an empty amusement park. And no amusement park is so sad as Coney Island. Once the world's playground, it is no longer the world's anything; not even important enough to be forgotten. Coney Island is the metal basket at the bottom of Brooklyn's sink. So it is that when the County of Kings is stood on end, Coney Island will trap all the detritus, human and otherwise, before it pours into the Atlantic.

Coney Island's demise would be easy to blame on the urban planners, especially Robert Moses, who thought it best to warehouse the niggers, spics and white trash far away from the crown jewel of Manhattan in distant outposts like Rockaway and Coney Island. If they could have built their ugly shoe box housing projects on the moon, they would have. It is no accident that the subway rides from Coney Island and Rockaway to Manhattan are two of the longest in the system. But Coney Island's decay is as much a product of its birth as anything else.

Coney Island, the rusted remnants of its antiquated rides rising out of the ocean like the fossils of beached dinosaurs, clings to a comatose existence. Like the senile genius, Coney Island has lived just long enough to mock itself. And nothing epitomizes its ironic folly better than the parachute jump. A ploughman's Eiffel Tower, its skeleton soars two hundred and fifty feet straight up off the grounds of what had once been Steeplechase Park. But the parachutes are long gone and now only the looming superstructure remains, the sea air feasting on its impotent bones.

So what is it about Coney Island that gives it extra interest? Is it the details of its decline? Is it the thumbnail history? I'd say neither. In fact, as presented there is nothing inherently interesting about Coney Island at all. That's the point. It's the ragged end of nowhere. There's nothing left of it.

Nothing, that is, except the evident sadness—or is it anger?—that the narrator feels about the state of this one-time seaside playground. Read the passage again. Is this narrator dispassionate? Hardly. Is Coney Island itself to blame for its misery? That explanation doesn't satisfy me, but that's not important. What keeps me reading is that the narrator demands an answer to an impossible question. He needs to understand something that cannot be understood. Tension exists not in the place itself but inside the one observing it.

Backstory is the bane of virtually all manuscripts. Authors imagine that readers need, even want, a certain amount of filling in. I can see why they believe that. It starts with critique groups in which writers hear comments such as, "I love this character! You need to tell me more about her!" Yes, the author does. But not right away. As they say in the theater, make 'em wait. Later in the novel backstory can become a revelation; in the first chapter it always bogs things down.

But there are exceptions. Robin Hobb's The Farseer Trilogy revolves around power struggles in the kingdom of the Six Duchies. The second volume,
Royal Assassin
(1996), places young FitzChivalry Farseer into the middle of this mess, charged with protecting the heir apparent while an invasion looms, a usurper schemes, and the king is dying. As the novel opens, Fitz quietly occupies himself with writing a treatise on magic:

Why is it forbidden to write down specific knowledge of the magics? Perhaps because we all fear that such knowledge would fall into the hands of one not worthy to use it.

Right away, Hobb creates below-the-radar apprehension in the readers. Will Fitz get into trouble for setting down his knowledge? Will his discourse on magic fall into the wrong hands? Is he himself unworthy in some way to handle magic entrusted to him? Fitz even pauses in his writing to question his own understanding:

But when I sit down to the task, I hesitate. Who am I to set my will against the wisdom of those who have gone before me?

Hobb does not rely on any hypothetical inherent interest in how magic works in her world to carry the readers along. Wisely, she knows that it is Fitz's own inner conflict that makes his musings matter. A little later in the opening, Hobb takes Fitz on a deeper exploration of his motives and, therefore, his fitness (or not) to employ magic:

Power. I do not think I ever wanted it for its own sake. I thirsted for it, sometimes, when I was ground down, or when those close to me suffered beneath ones who abused their powers. Wealth. I never really considered it. From the moment that I, his bastard grandson, pledged myself to King Shrewd, he always saw to it that all my needs were fulfilled. I had plenty to eat, more education than I sometimes cared for, clothes both simple and an-noyingly fashionable, and often enough a coin or two of my own to spend. Growing up in Buckkeep, that was wealth enough and more than most boys in Buckkeep Town could claim. Love? Well. My horse Sooty was fond enough of me, in her own placid way. I had the true-hearted loyalty of a hound named Nosy, and that took him to his grave. I was given the fiercest of loves by a terrier pup, and it was likewise the death of him. I wince to think of the price willingly paid for loving me.

Always I have possessed the loneliness of one raised amid intrigues and clustering secrets, the isolation of a boy who cannot trust the completeness of his heart to anyone. I could not go to Fedwren, the court scribe, who praised me for my neat lettering and well-inked illustrations, and confide that I was already apprenticed to the royal assassin, and thus could not follow his writing trade. Nor could I divulge to Chade, my master in the Diplomacy of the Knife, the frustrating brutality I endured trying to learn the ways of the Skill from Galen the Skill Master. And to no one did I dare speak openly of my emerging proclivity for the Wit, the ancient beast magic, said to be a perversion and a taint to any who used it.

Not even to Molly.

Notice how much backstory Hobb slips into the above. We learn a lot about what happened to Fitz in the trilogy's first volume. But is that the point of the passage? No; it is, rather, to develop Fitz's sense of duty toward King Shrewd and set it against his feelings of isolation.

He can confide his problems to no one yet he longs to open his heart. You see? Inner tension. That in turn stirs our own curiosity to learn what will happen to Fitz. Nothing in the backstory itself does that; only Fitz's torn emotions cause us to care.

To put it more simply, Hobbs uses the past to create present conflict. That is the secret of making backstory work.

There was a time when aftermath passages were considered essential to a novel. Even today, some fiction instructors preach the pattern of scene-sequel-scene. The theory goes that after a significant story development, the protagonist (and the readers) needs a pause to digest the significance of this new situation, to make decisions and gather resolve to go forward.

I do not believe in aftermath. The human brain moves faster than any author's fingers can type. The importance of any plot turn is, for most readers, immediately apparent. Mulling it over on the page doesn't add anything fresh. The readers' minds are already racing ahead. In any event, I find that most aftermath is the easiest material in any manuscript to skim. It lacks tension.

Usually.

Kim Edwards wrote a major bestseller in
The Memory Keeper's Daughter
(2005), the story of a doctor, David Henry, who on a snowy night in 1964 finds that he must handle his pregnant wife's delivery, aided only by nurse Caroline Gill. Two babies are born, one a healthy son and the other a daughter with all the indicators of Down's syndrome. Dr. Henry tells his wife that the daughter died, but secretly instructs the nurse to bring the baby to an institution.

Caroline Gill instead contemplates raising the handicapped girl herself. Dr. Henry learns of this and washes his hands of the matter. He wants to know nothing about it and wants his family to remain ignorant, a decision that will haunt everyone involved for years. Following this scene with Dr. Henry, Caroline considers the choice she must make:

He left, then, and everything was the same as it had been: the clock on the mantel, the square of light on the floor, the sharp shadows of bare branches. In a few

weeks the new leaves would come, feathering out on the trees and changing the shapes on the floors. She had seen all this so many times, and yet the room seemed strangely impersonal now, as if she had never lived here at all. Over the years she had bought very few things for herself, being naturally frugal and imagining, always, that her real life would happen elsewhere. The plaid sofa, the matching chair—she liked this furniture well enough, she had chosen it herself, but she saw now that she could easily leave it. Leave all of it, she supposed, looking around at the framed prints of landscapes, the wicker magazine rack by the sofa, the low coffee table. Her own apartment seemed suddenly no more personal than a waiting room in any clinic in any town. And what else, after all, had she been doing here all these years but waiting?

She tried to silence her thoughts. Surely there was another, less dramatic way. That's what her mother would have said, shaking her head, telling her not to play Sarah Bernhardt. Caroline hadn't known for years who Sarah Bernhardt was, but she knew well enough her mother's meaning: any excess of emotion was a bad thing, disruptive to the calm order of their days. So Caroline had checked all her emotions, as one would check a coat. She had put them aside and imagined that she'd retrieve them later, but of course she never had, not until she had taken the baby from Dr. Henry's arms. So something had begun, and now she could not stop it. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. She would leave this place today. She could start a new life somewhere else. She would have to do that, anyway, no matter what she decided to do about the baby. This was a small town; she couldn't go to the grocery store without running into an acquaintance. She imagined Lucy Martin's eyes growing wide, the secret pleasure as she relayed Caroline's lies,